Modernism.

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there"


Before industrialisation we lacked the ability to mass produce things and relied on skilled craftsmen who had specific talents to produce things. When machines started to take over household "cottage" industries started to disappear as people turned to industrialised made products because they were produced faster and at a cheaper rate. As these machines required less specific skilled knowledge to produce things it meant more people were able to take up jobs in different fields that their predecessors would not have been able to do. For example in pre-industrialisation people would follow the craft of their fathers not only to carry on the business but because they were taught from a young age the skills.


Industrialisation was seen as progress which meant moving forward and leaving the past behind. It was revolution rather than evolution. The past was rejected by modernist artists and designers and they focused completely on the future. After the industrial revolution mass production meant everyone could own the same thing as products became less unique due to the lack of individual crafting. 

"If you look to the future and keep one eye on the past you are blind in one eye. If you keep both eyes on the future and no eyes on the past you are blind in both eyes and God have mercy on you." - Beniton
"In a kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is King." - Desiderius Erasmus

Modernism started from about 1850. It proposes new forms of art on the grounds that they are more appropriate to present day and is characterised by constant innovation. It has often been driven by social and political issues, often utopian. Modernism was generally associated with ideal visions of human life, society and a belief in progress.

The terms modernism and modern art are used to describe the succession of art movements that critics and historians have identified since the Realism of Courbet, culminating in abstract art and its developments up to the 1960s. By that time modernism had become a dominant idea of art, and a particularly narrow theory of modernist painting had been made by the highly influential American critic Clement Greenberg. The reaction that then took place which was quickly identified as Postmodernism.
Postmodernism rejects the modernist ideology that ignores the past and treats both the past and the future as the same. It also highlighted the paradox of making everything depthless. 

"If the 'master craftsman' is no longer needed, what does that say about creation and talent?"
"If everyone is talented then no one is, if everyone can make music then no one can."